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Chapter 5: Orbiting (Part 2)

"Climbing Up the Walls," the most sonically adventurous song on Radiohead's breakthrough 1997 album, OK Computer:

On "Morning Bell," from Amnesiac, an A-minor chord alternates with a C-sharp-minor one. It's another case of Thom Yorke's pivot-tone maneuver (p. 94): here the pivot tone is the note E, which both chords have in common:

Compare another passage from "Morning Bell"—in the version heard on Kid A—with the Tarnhelm motif from Wagner's Ring:

The opening of "Pyramid Song", from Amnesiac, with strings playing glissando harmonics (p. 95):

The entire song live:

Radiohead at their most experimental — "National Anthem," live in 2003:

The composer Paul Lansky, a pioneer of computer music, has written on his website about his connection to the band: his 1973 piece mild und leise is sampled in Radiohead's "Idioteque." Lansky's piece, in turn, is based on the "Tristan chord" from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde — the famously ambiguous, free-floating chord that set off a revolution in late-nineteenth-century harmony and prefigured atonality. Here is a progression of samples, from Wagner to Lansky to Radiohead: